Image-to-text conversions made in Chafa by its author, Hans Petter Jansson, 2025. The first two use the Terminus font and the bottom two use Blapinus. The original Himeji image is 3.4 MB in the PNG-format, while the 200-column text version is less than 0.9 MB. A JPG in 90% quality is 724 KB while a gzip-compressed 200-column text version is 230 KB.
In 1992, it was discovered that ‘NYC’ written with Microsoft’s Wingdings font, was rendered as above. Microsoft was accused with antisemitism, which they denied. Their Webdings font, released in 1997, instead rendered NYC as eye, heart and city skyline. After 9/11 there was a hoax circulating about Wingdings, which you can read about in The Wingdings Controversy.
Here’s a few font experiments, more or less sensible, that you should be aware of:
Alpha-blox, a font by American Type Founders, 1944. via
From Specimens of types & borders and illustrated catalogue of printers’ joinery and materials by H. W. Caslon & Co, 1915. via
Jupiter Ace, a British computer from 1982. It used Forth instead of BASIC and it could display more text characters on the screen than most of its competitors (64×48 compared to the more common 40×24). It used the same font as ZX Spectrum.
These are IBM’s first computers: IBM 5100 (1975) and IBM 5110 (1978).
The 5100 had 256 characters but half of the characters were just underscored versions of the other half. It used IBM’s mega obscure EBCD encoding instead of ASCII. IBM 5110 dropped most of the underscored characters, which made room for semi-graphic characters. Encoding was changed to the slightly less obscure EBCDIC, and there were 14 localized character sets with 12 characters each.
Character set photos from Voidstar, where there are also more details about the character sets.
